TV audience measurement may not be the most fascinating topic ever, but it’s important to some Dear Readers. Those will be interested to learn that NBCUniversal is organizing a forum to explore new measurement products. Participants include major trade groups, agencies, and brands. Motivations include the new TV viewing methods and problems with the once-standard Nielsen ratings service.
Online grocery service Instacart just bought cheerily-named Caper AI, which offers AI-powered in-store shopping cart and checkout technology. The system uses object recognition to understand what shoppers have placed in their carts, presumably without judging. It will help both Instacart workers and people buying for themselves – a group that apparently now needs a special label. I vote for “citizen shoppers”.
This Advertiser Perceptions study gives a little more insight into how TV ad buyers are thinking. Sure enough, accurate measurement and attribution heads the list of challenges, cited by 57%, followed accurate viewer data (43%) and targeting across linear and connected TV (38%). Privacy (31%) and ID resolution (29%) rank last.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.